Barry Sonnenfeld, Call Your Mother

CHAPTER 1

Barry Sonnenfeld. Call Your Mother.

At 2:20 a.m., as January 28th gave way to the 29th, I knew my father was dead. It was 1970, and I was at Madison Square Garden with Judy Dakin. The next morning, I would discover she wore magenta satin panties.

At the time of the concert, we were students at Music & Art High School. I was a french horn player; Judy had gotten in on her piano skills. We were protesting the Vietnam War along with 22,000 other lovers of peace, not war, by attending the Winter Festival for Peace concert.

Jimi Hendrix and his Band of Gypsies were warming up for the second time. Earlier in the evening Hendrix had been on stage, tuned his guitar, walked around a bit, and then, not feeling the vibe, walked off in a huff.

It was a tad unsettling.

Other musical acts moved up in the queue, including Blood, Sweat & Tears; Richie Havens; the Rascals; Harry Belafonte; Dave Brubeck; Judy Collins; and the cast of Hair.

There was, of course, a moving version of “Blowin’ in the Wind” by Peter, Paul and Mary.

I was eight weeks short of my 17th birthday and was living a life (if you call it living) full of contradictions. I had never been out this late without my parents, yet I went to the most progressive public high school in New York City. I was the shortest male attending Music & Art, though nine months later I would be six feet tall, still retaining my “short” weight of 108 pounds. I was exceedingly overprotected by my parents, yet to their credit, neither one of them wanted me to take on an iconic Jewish profession, like the law, medicine, or finance. My mother wanted me to be an artist and my father told me to decide what would bring me pleasure in life and figure out how to make money doing it.

As profoundly short as I was, every day I trudged a quite large Sansone full double french horn to Music & Art on the 104 bus, hoping to run into Rosaline Jacobowitz, a clarinetist who had a prominent blackhead on the right side of her nose crease.

My mother feared for my life on an hourly basis, yet the high school she had secretly worked the system to get me into was located at 135th Street and Convent Avenue, in the heart of Harlem, which, during the mid-’60s, was a very, very dangerous neighborhood.

For all her insanity, her fears, her lies, and her neediness, my mother, Irene “Kelly” (her maiden name was Kellerman) Sonnenfeld, was politically aware and outspoken. Kelly had attended Hunter College, and, according to my mother, her best friend at the school was future congresswoman and large hat wearer Bella Abzug.

I say “according to my mother” because Irene “Kelly” Sonnenfeld was a pathological liar, which was excellent training for working with certain film producers and studio executives down the road.

Mom was a liberal, hinting that she might have at one time been a communist. One of the worst days of her life was the day Adlai Stevenson died, and nothing could make her “go through the roof” more quickly than my Eleanor Roosevelt jokes:

“I am going to go through the roof, Barry. Not funny.”

And then, Mom would sob.

At the age of ten, I announced I wanted to play the trumpet. Mom decided there were plenty of trumpet players, but very few good french hornists. She figured that the whole Vietnam skirmish was going to blow up into a full-scale war, and if I was a french horn player and was drafted (eight years down the road), I’d be in the army band instead of the infantry, and therefore less likely to be killed. Besides, Mom told me, both instruments were in the brass section, and after the war blew over I could switch to the trumpet.

Ten years old, but practicing to avoid the infantry.

With the possible exception of Pete Seeger, the Chad Mitchell Trio, and (somewhat suspect) Danny Kaye, no one tugged at my mother’s heartstrings more than Peter, Paul and Mary. Since they were performing, and because the concert was called The Winter Festival for Peace, she let me attend.

“Okay, Barry. You can go. But you must be home by two. Tops.”

The Garden event was huge. It was perhaps the biggest rally against the war up until that time. Many hours into the concert, as thrilling and emotional as it had been, we were all aware that everything would be eclipsed by Jimi’s performance, if he actually came back.

We were all expecting greatness, although with Hendrix, you knew it could go either way. He was having his addiction issues and there were rumors he wasn’t happy with his band, but it was also a night of great hope. We had all come together, audience and musicians, to somehow stop a war. And Hendrix was going to bring us home.

The arena exploded in screams and cheers and poundings on the bottom half of our seats as Hendrix reappeared. He spent a long time tuning his guitar, adding to the tension. Jimi would stop and start, then go over to various Gypsies and whisper something. He seemed agitated and angry.

Okay. So that’s the scene. He was ready. Though twitchy, it was evident that Jimi was pulling it together and something special was about to happen. Twenty-two thousand attendees leaned forward in rapt silence as Jimi nodded to his band.

We were about to witness history.

As his left hand started the motion to make contact with his guitar strings, breaking the tense silence, the following announcement echoed over the Garden’s public address system:

“Barry Sonnenfeld.

Call your mother.”

Three things happened at once:

By standing up, I effectively announced to my surrounding peaceniks that yes, I was, indeed, Barry Sonnenfeld, and that, yes, I was going to call my mother.

The chant grew louder.

Weeping, mucous pouring out my nose, I stumbled to a pay phone, put a dime into the slot, picked up the receiver—sticky from years of mustard, ketchup, and relish hands—and dialed my home phone number: WAdsworth 8-6160.

As it started to ring, I imagined the myriad obstacles that had lain in the path of Mom’s attempt to reach me: from getting someone to actually answer the phone at the Garden, to convincing them that the issue at hand was so important—the death of an only child’s parent—that Jimi Hendrix had to be interrupted. But Kelly’s skill at manipulation, especially playing the helpless victim, was her strength.

My father, although a consumer of sixteen ounces of sour cream a night, was a healthy man. He did a tremendous amount of walking, calling on various lighting designers, architects, and studio engineers, trying to sell them lights and dimmer board equipment. Just the walk from the A train subway station to our apartment was a quarter of a mile. In spite of all that exercise, I knew that Nathan J. “Sonny” Sonnenfeld just had a massive heart attack.

Mom picked up the phone and not surprisingly, given the fact that my father was dead, was, like me, weeping uncontrollably.

“Mom. Is everything okay?”

“What?”

“Is everyone all right?”

“What are you talking about?”

“Dad. Is he dead?”

“What?”

“Mom. Who died?”

“I thought you did!”

“What are you talking about?”

“You said you would be home by two. It’s two-twenty.”

“But did they not tell you the concert was still going on?”

“Yes. Yes, they did. But they couldn’t confirm you were there. Come home right now.”

“Dad’s okay?”

“Sonny? Of course he’s okay. He’s sound asleep for a change. What else is new?”

Mom agreed that it was too late to take Judy home, given that she lived in Laurelton, Queens, the second to last stop on the F train, and allowed that Judy could sleep on the living room couch, which in earlier years had been reserved for Cousin Mike the Child Molester.

An important aside: Mike was my mother’s first cousin. Raul, a neighbor in my apartment building and my best friend growing up, and I called him Cousin Mike the Child Molester and shortened it to CM the CM. For several years in the early ’60s, while he was out of work, Mike lived with us, sleeping on our living room couch. He kept Kelly company, driving her to malls and antique shops. He also molested Raul, several other neighborhood kids, a few of my cousins, and, yes, me.

But hey, back to the Garden.

As I was walking down the steep concrete steps back to my seat, trying not to sled down the gooey, gummy, sticky slide of stairs, I sensed something was very wrong with Jimi.

It was a disaster.

Hendrix had stopped playing, about a song and a half into his scheduled forty-minute slot. Before putting down his guitar and wandering off stage, he said something that sounded like, “This is what happens when Earth fucks with Space. Never forget that. This is what happens.”

Peter Yarrow, the Peter of Peter, Paul and Mary, who was the MC and one of the planners of the concert, now gone so disastrously wrong, announced, “Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome the cast of Hair.”

A few minutes later, they, and the entire Madison Square Garden audience, minus Judy Dakin and me—who were snaking our way through Penn Station trying to find the A train to take us up to Washington Heights—were singing “Let the Sun Shine In.”

The next morning, my parents went to work before Judy and I had our first class at Music & Art. Although it would be years before we went all the way, I did discover that morning that she wore wonderfully shiny magenta-colored panties. And that her kisses tasted like sour milk.

A few days later, Hendrix would tell Rolling Stone that, as he saw it, the Madison Square Garden disaster was “like the best ending I could possibly have come up with” for Band of Gypsies.

Eight months later, Hendrix was dead.

I blame my mother.